It’s probably safe to say that everyone reading this article has at least one, if not a half dozen or more USB flash drives. They’ve become so inexpensive that they’re everywhere and nobody thinks twice about having a handful of them nearby. The thing that most of them have in common is the fact that they’re boring rectangles that plug into your USB port.

There’s a company that’s trying to make USB flash drives fun again. Mimoco (pronounced: mee-mo-ko) has taken the standard USB 2.0 flash drive and turned them into characters from popular culture. There are drives from DC Comics, Transformers, G.I. Joe, and of course Star Wars. These drives are called Mimobots (pronounced: mee-mo-bots), and last month the company released their “Series 8” Star Wars collection, including Slave Leia, Luke Skywalker, Jabba the Hutt, Admiral Ackbar, and (a Comic Con exclusive) Biker Scout. They sent us Luke, Jabba, and Ackbar, each eight gigabytes, to look over.

The first reaction everyone has is that the drives just look cool. Yeah, technically they’re just molded plastic around a small amount of silicon, but they’re unique from any other flash drive we’ve seen, giving them a wow-factor. The packaging was high quality as well, clearly showing that the product is a USB drive but also emphasizing the Star Wars theme.

The devices themselves feel very sturdy. We tried to twist and squeeze the drives and they held up well without any apparent flexing or give. While we didn’t directly try to break them, they survived a couple of days in a pocket with keys without any ill effects.

We ran a few performance tests on these drives and compared them to a couple of other flash drives we had laying around – a SanDisk Cruzer Titanium Plus and an unlabeled Kingston drive. We used the Roadkil Disk Speed utility to test performance.

Overall, the Mimobot’s exceeded the performance of the other two drives. The “overall score” that the utility provided was 10476 compared to 8629 for the SanDisk Cruzer and only 6030 for the Kingston drive. The Mimobot’s speed topped off at 33.27 MB/sec when writing 1024KB blocks and 33.05 MB/sec when reading the same sized blocks. Keep in mind that the drives we were comparing against were not state of the art devices, but the results do show that the Mimobot has good performance. You can see the results from the tests in the gallery (where we manually labeled each drive in the “Drive to Test” textbox).

Each Mimobot drive also comes with some bonus extras pre-installed on them. These include some funny wallpapers of the drives superimposed on various scenes from the Star Wars movie, some icons and avatars, as well as sound effects that are randomly played when you insert and remove the Mimobot. It’s a nice touch that rounds out the device.

The “series 8” Star Wars Mimobots range in sizes between 8 and 64 gigabytes and range in price from $19.99 (8 gigabytes) to $69.99 (64 gigabytes), although there are older versions (like Lobot from Cloud City) that are cheaper. If you only need something to store your data, then you probably want to stick with a standard USB flash drive since you can get them cheaper. On the other hand, if you want to store data and have a cool looking device that people will love to see, then we can highly recommend the Mimobots.